


Zhornu

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Genre: Angst, Dubious Consent, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Prison Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-02 13:14:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18811627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: Thara does not need to go to Aina. Yet he does.





	Zhornu

_You need not go to them,_ Edrehasivar told him the day before.

 _Neither, if you will forgive our forthrightness, did you, Serenity,_ Thara replied. Muttering something about the rapid spread of news at court, the Emperor signed and sealed the pass. It has seen Thara through a guardroom full of suspiciously glaring armsmen of all affiliations, two subsequent checkpoints, and five increasingly lightless halls of the Nevennamire, leaving him in the last with a grim-faced gaoler who cavils at his request for privacy but nonetheless unlocks the tiny audience room before disappearing. The small, round chamber is lit by guttering gaslight, its only features a bench near the door, and Thara has only his wavering shadow on the opposite wall to contemplate before the door swings open and the gaoler re-enters, followed by...

Aina looks little worse than he had at Thara’s last sight of him. His shabby worker’s garb has been traded for a shabby prison uniform, his hair cropped no shorter than it had been at the Amal-Athamareise Airship Company hangar. A dully fading bruise lies over one eyebrow, from under which he regards Thara with the level, intense gaze with which he regards everyone and everything. As Thara approaches, he makes as if to speak, then seems to reconsider, the only sound in the room the gaoler’s muttered, “Knock thrice when you are finished, mer Witness, and we will see you out,” as he exits the room, not even bothering to secure the shackles at Aina's wrists and ankles to the bench.

“I had wondered,” Aina says after a few moments, unable as ever to stay silent in the face of an even half-listening ear, “when wouldst come to me.”

Every speech, every turn of phrase practiced on the way through those dark warrens behind him, vanishes from Thara’s mind at that _to me_. He finds himself unable to keep a tremor from his ears even as his eyes meet Aina’s steadily. “Given,” he begins with a slow breath, “our position in the investigation of your crimes, we felt that facing you was the least we might do. We do not ask for your forgiveness or understanding, simply to see what our work has wrought.”

“Then hast seen it. Unless hast some other reason as well.” There is no jibe in Aina’s words, only the fiery sincerity that has captivated and killed so many.

Thara feels his face heat at Aina’s rejection of informality. “What do you imply?”

“Dost mean to entertain a dying man’s last request, or simply to allow thyself a last audience with one who cares nothing for thine own shame?” He steps forward and Thara reflexively steps back, feeling his back bump the thick-barred door behind them. Suddenly, Aina’s light but wiry-strong weight is pressing Thara’s damnably small frame against the rough wood. The shackles seem to hinder him not at all, dangling from his wrists to lie coldly against Thara's upraised arms  like guilt. Like death.

“The Emperor—” Thara’s breath catches at the press of Aina’s thigh between his. He presses on with single-minded fervor: “...has allowed us to come here for these reasons. No more, and no less.”

Mad, beautiful eyes the color of sapphires, summer sky, everything furthest from the Nevennamire darkness, meet Thara’s until he feels flayed to the bone, his desires laid bare for the Ethuveraz to see and to disdain. “Thy body suggests otherwise, _zhornu._ ”

He might cry for the guard. He considers it, briefly, as Aina’s tongue parts his lips. Aina is right—already he feels himself growing hard, hard as the unyielding, desperate denial in which he has existed for so many years. Against his lips he feels Aina smirk. The hard-muscled thigh parting his own sends ripples of pure sensation through legs weak with both ardor and fear and at this he begins to struggle in earnest. A huff of breath that may be the cousin of a laugh brushes his cheek. “I don’t mean to hurt thee, Thara,” Aina says. “Or try to ransom thee back to the Emperor for my life, or any such thing. I have made my peace with the form which my ascension will take.”

“That thou canst believe these things still…” Thara lapses into silence, barely able to avoid squirming as Aina’s teeth dig into a certain spot on the side of his neck. A harsh reek of cheap soap and negotiably clean prison garb cannot entirely mask the ground-in scent of machine oil and creosote, heady as poppy milk, the scent that Thara had gulped down breath after breath of as the two of them rutted like beasts in Thara’s dilapidated boardinghouse room. The memory sends another tremor of desire through his weak flesh.

“And yet hast no words to refute mine.” The old surety, the blindness to anything but his cause, weights every word with a finality like death. “Didst obviously not come to debate, in any case.”

“Every argument I bit back as I listened to thy ‘philosophy’ still resounds in my mind,” Thara rasps, the anger burning through him almost enough to drive back the arousal flooding his loins. “Thy single-minded rejection of order and compromise toward a shared goal, thine embrace of the selfishness Curnar advocated in the guise of transcending the rules of the sheep he considered his fellow men. ‘Twas not true then, nor is it now, but wilt surely listen no more now than wouldst have in the Stone Tree.”

Aina bites the base of his neck with some sort of rejoinder Thara does not hear over his attempt to stifle a moan. How many minutes has he been pinned helpless against the door? Will the guard notice his absence, or simply wait for a knock long in coming? Were he to open the viewing window over Thara's head, to see the disgraced pervert of an ex-Witness near a ravishment such as all marnei are known to desire, would he intercede or simply watch with amusement? The shame that ought to wither his ardor is instead near enough to make Thara spend in that instant.

“I could see it in thee, thou knowest.” Aina’s palms cup his buttocks, touches as lascivious as his voice is earnest and level. Thara jerks back, only to rub himself harder against Aina’s thigh. “Thine own drive for something to stand for, not quite our own, but still in search of something might’st devote thyself to as eagerly as didst once serve the old gods. Some way to remake thyself into something thou might’st stand. Hadst found us sooner, might’st have made a zhornu in sooth.”

Thara’s hands are knotted in the rough fabric of Aina’s shirt, somewhere between the clawing of a frightened animal and an avid lover’s desperation. “Perhaps,” he breaths, the word burning on his tongue. “Desperation can make lies seem as truth to the desperate. In my life…”

He draws a shuddering breath, searching for the words to finish the sentence but Aina’s lips are on his again with a ravenous hunger. For long minutes, Thara’s mind screams and his touch-starved body throbs at every brush of Aina’s fingers over shoulder blades, flanks, thews. Aina’s anger, the betrayal he surely feels despite his casual words, are apparent in every rapacious grasp of Thara’s flesh, now in this handful of hours before his life is to end, and yet Thara cannot, _will_ not, pull away. Cannot offer whatever debate or guidance or apology he came here to bestow. Can only gasp as Aina's hands slide under his shirt to rake the bony expanse of Thara's chest, as his teeth close around Thara's ear hard enough to make him wince with pain, as dark fingers pinch Thara's nipples into stiff peaks.

“It is already beginning,” Aina pants as he breaks for air. “I said as much to the Emperor. He wished to understand, and I did my best to explain in our limited time. He did not understand, of course, but with the seed planted—”

It is Thara’s turn to roughly grab, crushing his lips to Aina’s more to silence than to titillate. Judging by the twitch of Aina’s cock through homespun trousers, it nonetheless achieves both outcomes. “The Emperor is a pious and upright man,” Thara grates, a pitiful sound in the stony silence of the cell. “He would no more accept the Doctrine of Universal Ascendence than he has any of thine other crimes.”

“So certain,” There is a laughing edge to Aina’s voice that makes Thara swallow hard against the sudden taste of bile. “Art more devoted to him than I might have imagined. Didst imagine it was him thou fucked as we lay together?”

All the breath seems driven from Thara’s lungs. He struggles for a suitable riposte as Aina turns him bodily, pinning him with his face to the door. Aina does mean to have him, then, tearing away the last vestige of illusion that Thara does not expect this, has not expected it since entering the Nevennamire. Has not _wanted_ —

Suddenly, rough fingers are on the fastenings of his trousers and Aina’s breath is hot against one twitching, oversensitized ear. He thinks, suddenly, ludicrously, of the blue-backed novels he has never had the courage to read, tales of decadent, lusty goblin lords brutally ravishing delicate elven captives who inevitably cannot help but give themselves over to base lust. As Thara gives himself over now, as with a slow deliberation unbefitting a brutal avar Aina drags Thara’s trousers down, parts his thighs, presses inside him, the full, thick length of the shaft opening Thara inch by inch.

The feeling is painful and degrading and blissfully, shamefully _needed_ , and Thara finds himself meeting Aina’s every thrust with choked, sobbing gasps—and returning thrusts. Aina says nothing more, does not need to. His gasps of pleasure at every wringing squeeze of Thara’s body suggest that this is as much a reprieve for him as a punishment for Thara. _Damn thee, damn thee,_ his mind screams, unsure which of them he addresses. He can hear only his own ragged breath, the pounding of his own heart—years of denial alternating with shameful, silent trysts have given him enough self-control in, at least, this single regard.

“If relax’st thy body, ‘twill hurt far less.” Aina’s voice seems to come from far away, faint through the miasma of pain and pleasure from each raw tear of his cock into and out of Thara’s wire-tense body. “Unless the hurt is what thou long’st for in sooth. Had I known I might have taken a lash to thee when we lay together. Or simply my hand."

"Thy lusts are as perverse as thy beliefs," Thara gasps.

"Says he," Aina replies, raking his hand over one trembling thigh to grasp Thara's cock, "who seeks to punish himself for what those men who masquerade as higher beings say is wrong.”

A few rough, measured strokes of Aina’s hand and, Aina’s blasphemy ringing through his head, he is whimpering, shuddering, dying hard enough to make his legs buckle beneath him. The climax sparks the tears he has not, _could_ not otherwise have shed as he spills across Aina's fingers and the door before him, wondering briefly if anyone will notice the stains before he chokes back a shout at the feeling of Aina slamming into him with the brutality of single-minded pleasure-seeking. With the desperation of the doomed and dying Aina fucks into him for all he is worth, body showing what his words will not, until he disentangles himself and his bonds from Thara before stepping back unsteadily to withdraw none too gently. Thara feels the trickle of Aina’s seed down his thighs as Aina uses a length of tunic sleeve to clean his softening member and Thara’s own abraded hole. “Mayest count thy ministration complete,” he tells Thara, who cannot bear to turn away from the door as he does up his trousers. “Unless thou wouldst minister to the others as well. I imagine Bralchenar could use the solace in his remaining hours, and Narchanezhen —”

“Damn thee,” Thara rasps aloud for the first time since his ordination. He leans against the door, its weight nearly enough to keep him from slumping with the weight of his own degradation. It is all he can do to put his clothing in order—some of it is surely stained and ruined, but he cannot bring himself to think on anything beside his own worthlessness.

“I forgive thee.” A pause. “Zhornu Celehar.”

Back still to Aina, shoulders squared, Thara knocks once, twice, thrice on the door. Five endless heartbeats later the door swings open, the gaoler’s face blank. Perhaps he has not heard after all, though Thara imagines his depravity must be written in every line of his face, a thick, ugly scrawl like the handwriting of a child or an idiot.

He does not turn to look back as the door swings closed behind them, and Aina’s silence is all he can hear.


End file.
